The News From Japan
The News From Japan
Despite all coverage of the US election craziness, things are happening elsewhere too
OK to be honest the first item is news from the Southern California coast. As the photo above shows, a US F-35B made a landing on the JMSDF Kaga. Any surviving combatants from the Pacific theater of WW2 are probably boggling at this given what the previous ship of the same name did from Pearl Harbor to Midway (where it was damaged so badly by bombs from US aircraft that it was scuttled).
By an amazing coincidence the aircraft lifts for the Kaga are just big enough and strong enough to move an F-35B despite it being launched as a “helicopter destroyer” about a decade ago. Also entirely coincidentally the current Kaga is the same length (ok technically 18 inches longer) as the previous one.
Weird coincidences huh? There’s absolutely no message being sent there at all.
Anyway those of us concerned about defending Taiwan from attacks by its large neighbor, West Taiwan, can only see this test as a good thing.
Talking of Taiwan. A few years back I wrote a piece about how invading Taiwan is not simple and there I mentioned that you really didn’t want to do that until typhoon season was definitely over. In 2024 typhoon season will stretch into November as Typhoon 21 crosses the Taiwan strait on about November 1.
Sometime after that it’s going to hit Japan, according to the prophecy (see map), but probably as a significantly weakened tropical storm.
Moving on to Japan itself.
In Japan one of the stories that has bubbled along gradually over the last year is the restarting of 33 nuclear power plants 12 years after they were all shut down after the Tokoku tsunami and the Fukushima Daiichi power plant’s exciting failure to cope with the tsunami. Our local power plant, Kashima, is one of them and one surprising side-effect of the restart process is that hotels in Matsue are mostly booked out. This is because of all the technicians and engineers sent from other places (Hiroshima mostly) to help get everything up and running again. The reactor should up and generating power in early December and people hope that the nukes will lower our power bills.1
Also in Japan this last weekend we had a snap general election, which the LDP mostly lost but not convincingly. As a result of Japan’s mix of single seat directly elected members and party lists the new diet has no party with anywhere close to an absolute majority, although the LDP in conjunction with its usual coalition partner, the Komeito, comes closest with 215 out of the 465 seats.
There are numerous possible options and it seems that there is much backroom wheeling and dealing going on. The public as a whole is charmingly inconsistent as this Xeet points out:
Kyodo Opinion poll - Should Ishiba continue as PM or resign?
Resign: 28.6%
Continue as PM: 65.7%
Should the LDP-Komeito government continue?
Yes: 38.4%
No: 53.0%
As the Xeeter notes in follow up Xeets, what this probably means is that people want Ishiba to continue but they want a different coalition probably including the DPP (Kokumin Minshuto - 国民民主党). The DPP leadership says it may support the LDP/Komeito coalition but not join it.
The DPP is almost certainly in the driving seat as if it declines to support the LDP and instead opts for the opposition it is hard to see how Ishiba can form a government that can do anything. Bizarrely this political wooing of the DPP has turned into accusations of homophobia thanks to a pretty standard cartoon showing the DPP’s leader Tamaki being pulled in a kind of tug of war by the leaders of the LDP and the largest opposition party, the CDP (Rikken minshuto - 立憲民主党). Based on the way that at least one prominent gay CDP member jumped into the fray, Tamaki is likely to prefer the LDP
Taiga Ishikawa, an openly gay House of Councillors member of the CDP, raised an issue with Tamaki's comment on Oct. 30, tweeting, "I'd like to question his true intentions as the leader of a political party." Ishikawa continued, "If he was being pulled by two women, how would he have reacted? Perhaps with a 'shriek of joy' or something. When you consider that, his belief that heterosexuality is good and homosexuality is gross shows through."
Ishikawa told the Mainichi Shimbun on Oct. 30, "If the illustration showed him (Tamaki) being pulled by two women, he probably wouldn't have made such a comment. With laughter being heard from the venue (of the TV show recording), I feel that there is unconscious and hidden homophobia."
The reason for the LDP’s loss, and the reason the Ishiba is the new LDP leader as of a month ago is that the LDP has been mired in corruption scandals for the last year or two. The corruption isn’t new, it’s just been revealed and it appears to have been quite widespread across the LDP factions. Many of the most obviously tainted LDP pols lost their seats though three who were kicked out of the party won re-election anyway. However, while the electorate was definitely upset about the corruption I didn’t get the feeling that they were massively upset about the policies, though there is certainly some disquiet about inflation and a perception that Japan is gradually getting poorer. To that end the possible DPP alliance may help as that is pretty much the DPP’s main priority.
It is worth noting that Noda, the leader of the largest opposition party the CDP, was a former prime minister in 2012 and led that government into defeat against Shinzo Abe. As PM Noda implemented a rise in the consumption (sales) tax and promised to switch off the nuclear power plants for good. He also promised to put a stop to building any more plants. Personally I think Ishiba will be a better PM than Noda and I don’t think it is likely that anyone else will be able to get the votes.
On a personal note, we only received campaign literature from the commies and that probably because there’s a politically active commie who lives a few hundred meters away from us. To my amusement bullet point 2 or 3 was words to the effect of “we won’t implement real communism, we know the Japanese wouldn’t stand for it, so don’t worry and vote for us as a protest”. The adjacent bullet point 3 or 2 was “we’ll turn the nukes off, stop using coal and rely on unicorn farts renewable energy”
Enough of politics
The cheapness of the yen compared to other currencies means Japan is, as I have mentioned before, full of tourists. For the most part that’s a blessing but certain places (e.g. Kyoto) are suffering from being over-touristed. One restaurant in Kyoto has decided to reduce the number of foreigners in it by putting the following sign up:
The red text says “if you can read Japanese you are welcome to come in”.
On that tourist note, if you are thinking of coming here take a look at my other substack for places slightly off the beaten track. I hope to add a couple more entries to it this weekend
Next it seems our North Korean neighbor, the little rocket man, wants the world to pay him some attention again so he fired another rocket. The BBC’s article contains the following which shows just how much science knowledge BBC journos have:
North Korea has fired an intercontinental ballistic missile, which flew for 86 minutes - the longest flight recorded yet - and over 1,000km, before falling into waters off its east coast, South Korea and Japan said.
The ICBM was fired at a sharply-raised angle and reached as high as 7,000km (4,350 miles). This means that it if were launched horizontally, it would have covered a further distance.
Oddly outside the BBC, horizontal rocket launching is not a common technique for some reason
Finally we turn to sports where, according to Japanese TV/news media, Shohei Ohtani has finally put the World in “World Series” by winning it for the LA Dodgers apparently single-handedly appart for some minor assistance by Yoshinobu Yamamoto. Yes I exaggerate, but not by much.
The far better Japan Series (biased? moi?) is tied 2:2 much to the surprise of almost everyone because the Softbank Hawks completely dominated the Pacific league, while their opponents the DeNA Baystars finished third in the Central league but then beat teams 1 and 2 in the playoffs. The assumption was that the Hawks would win 4-0 and indeed they started off that way winning the first two games in Yokohama (DeNA’s home). Then they moved to Fukuoka where I’m sure preparations were made for mass celebrations and they choked. The Baystars have won both games so far and last night Softbank, who are supposed to a strong batting team, had a pathetic 5 hits and no runs. If DeNA win again tonight they’ll return to Yokohama ahead of Softbank which will be some kind of record.
We now return you to your US election madness
Talking of power bills one of our AC/heater systems kicked the bucket sometime in the last couple of months (while it was turned off) and the repair person told us the Japanese equivalent of “unrepairable, too old, parts not available, plus there’s half a dozen things that are going to fail any time if I do fix this issue” so we’re buying another one. To my shock and dismay I discovered that many such systems now want to be connected to the wifi network and be controlled from your phone. My search engine-fu is failing me and I can’t find the (xkcd?) cartoon I’m thinking of, but it depicts IT security people having zero network connected home devices and it absolutely applies here. I cannot stress how little I trust the people who build air conditioners to understand network security.
My wife politely told the AC guy that her husband was dead set against that and coincidentally that ruled out any of the high end models. Next week we get a “last year’s model reduced to clear” installed that has no wifi connectivity.